In praise of Kernus 3.0

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Ramiro Espinoza
Ramiro Espinoza Posts: 839
in Type Design Technique & Theory
I've been doing some test using URW's Kernus 3.0 and... call me whatever you want but I've found that it generates surprisingly good spacing. It's not perfect and there are always some few letters that I would space in a different way, but IMHO you can save time if in the first stages of development you use Kernus and just correct its output when necessary.
It's a pity that there is not an OS X version.
At the moment I am not using it to generate kerning because I rely more on MetricsMachine (and I like it that way).

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  • attar
    attar Posts: 209
    Ramiro Espinoza said:
    It's a pity that there is not an OS X version.
    There's this other tool, kernagic: https://github.com/hodefoting/kernagic that has an OSX version, fwiw. I don't know if you have tried that one already.
  • Ramiro Espinoza
    Ramiro Espinoza Posts: 839
    AFAIK, Kernagic is a different software.
  • LeMo aka PatternMan aka Frank E Blokland
    LeMo aka PatternMan aka Frank E Blokland Posts: 756
    edited January 2016
    Yes, Kernagic and Kernus 3.0 differ a lot (although I supplied the table-based algorithm* for the first and I recently gave the Kernus installer from April 1998 to Ramiro). I described the differences between Kernagic and Kernus 3.0 a bit in this topic. Kernagic uses the stem interval as starting point for the table-based spacing and Kernus calculates the white space based on some key characters like the lowercase n.

    Back in 1997–98 I was beta tester of this version of Kernus, which was the only one that went beyond kerning. It was developed for Mac OS 9 exclusively. I still provide my students who manage to get SheepShaver running with copies. We (URW++/DTL) actually never ported the stuff to FontMaster, but we’re considering to incorporate this auto-spacing (and the kerning generation) in GlyphMaster (like OTM available for OS X, Windows, and Linux). 

    * see also the LS Cadencer
  • Hin-Tak Leung
    Hin-Tak Leung Posts: 363
    @LeMo aka Frank E Blokland Ardi Executor went open-source some years ago, and I had good experience with it when it was still closed source. I think it emulate 68k mac though (os 8?).

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